Floyd Salas is the critically-acclaimed author of four novels, a memoir and two volumes of poetry. His publications include Tattoo the Wicked Cross (1967), winner of the Joseph Henry Jackson Award and a Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship; What Now My Love (1970); Lay My Body on the Line (1978), written and published on National Endowment for the Arts Literary Fellowships; the memoir Buffalo Nickel (1992), which earned him a California Arts Council Literary Fellowship; State of Emergency (1996), awarded the 1997 PEN Oakland Literary Censorship Award, and his poetry books, Color of My Living Heart (1996) and Love Bites: Poetry in Celebration of Dogs and Cats (2006).
He was a staff writer for the NBC drama, Kingpin, released in February, 2003 and a 2002-2003 Regent’s Lecturer at University of California, Berkeley. He has recently completed a novel about 1940s Oakland entitled Seventh Street Jump. He is also working on Maverick: Prayers of Heresy, a volume of new and selected poems from the last fifty years.
He is editor of Stories and Poems from Close to Home (1986) and other anthologies of San Francisco Bay Area writing, and the author of numerous essays and reviews about writing and the creative life. Tattoo the Wicked Cross and Buffalo Nickel are featured in Masterpieces of Hispanic Literature (HarperCollins 1994). His other awards and honors include a Rockefeller Foundation Fiction Scholarship, an NEA creative writing fellowship, and two outstanding teaching awards from the University of California, Berkeley. His fiction, non-fiction and poetry manuscripts as well as letters and biographical information are archived in the Floyd Salas collection in the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. His novel, Tattoo the Wicked Cross, earned a place on the San Francisco Chronicle's Western 100 List of Best 20th Century Fiction. He has taught creative writing at San Francisco State University, University of California, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, Sonoma State University, and Foothill College, as well as at numerous writing conferences and at San Quentin, Folsom, Vacaville and other correctional institutions. He is a founder and president of the multicultural writing group PEN Oakland, and a former boxing coach for University of California, Berkeley.
All considerations of language, of ideas, of symbols and metaphors serve only one function: to convey the soul of a living being to the soul of other living beings and in that process break us out of our isolation and loneliness and put us in touch with the universal spirit.
Doestoevsky; Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot Jack London: Martin Eden, The Call of the Wild Solshenitzen: Cancer Ward, One Day in the Life of Ivan Desinovich
Wow . . . Hello, Mr. Salas.
Wow . . . Hello, Mr. Salas.